Charlala + Sr. Wooly Resources = Happy Students & Teachers

Ever since I stumbled across Charlala.com, thanks to a post on Twitter, my mind has been bombarding me with ideas of how to use it in class. If you don't know about Charlala.com yet, go to the website and explore (you will love it, I promise) and check out these explanations of how I've used it in the past. 

My Spanish 1 students have watched Sr. Wooly's GUAPO video and completed a few of the extra activities that he provides on his website. One of those activities was the cloze activity. I printed the "fácil" version on one side of a paper and the "difícil" version of the cloze activity on the other side. (This is perfect for differentiating instruction in the classroom!)

After we went over the lyrics, students got an iPad and I instructed them to chose one of the lines in the story and to sketch it on the charlala.com webpage.  If you know the GUAPO song, you know that the lyrics are repeated many times, which means there weren't many things for the students to draw. (But, this can be a good thing! Read on.)

After the students submitted their sketches, I projected many of them onto the board. First, students had to identify which line of the song the sketch represented and then we described more details about the sketches. It didn't matter that there were five sketches of a man with green eyes and brown hair. The students heard a huge amount of comprehensible input on high frequency structures (tiene, es, soy) plus useful adjectives, nouns, and expressions (guapo, feo, mujeres, alto, no es necesario).

If you use songs with your students and want a new way to re-use the song for more comprehensible input, give this a try! If your song is a story, after viewing the sketches, you could ask students to put the song in order using the sketches.

 ENOY!